How Can We Stay FIt As Parents

A few generations ago, men routinely became fathers in their early to mid-20s (on purpose). This meant that, by age 35, the average guy may already have had a teenage son, and that just at the moment when his body started showing signs of aging (slight aches, longer recovery after a basketball game, full-day hangovers), the heavy lifting with the children was almost done. This left your typical man in the middle of the last century with little to do physically after age 40 but take care of his own body (and back then, that meant smoking a carton of Marlboro Reds a week). Cut to today, when couples are delaying having kids until later and later, and what do you have? A generation of men burping babies in bodies better suited for coaching Babe Ruth Prep. Biologically, chasing toddlers and chasing fly balls is a young man's game, not something nature intended men in their late 30s and early 40s to do. At an age when many athletes retire from their sports (see: Barry Sanders, 31, or Rocky Marciano, 32), men today are just starting to think about having kids. It's the perfect storm for poor health: more responsibility and stress, less time to exercise, easier access and desire for crappy foods, the instinctual impulse to put the well being of your child and wife above your own, and so on. This leaves us with millions of men having kids at the tail end of their physical peak, putting on hold the one thing that will keep them feeling younger for longer -- a healthy lifestyle. In order to avoid packing on the paternal pounds, you need a blueprint to maximize your minutes during the craziest time of your life. Here's a start: 1) Open Your Mind Trying to squeeze in a block of time to exercise on a day-to-day basis for the first half-year of your baby's life will just turn into a stress-inducing mess. Each day will be an exercise in futility, leaving you feeling rushed, annoyed and frustrated. With the right plan and the right mindset, you can eliminate this from happening. How can you do that? Your first order of business is to realize that your standard model for working out (dedicating a solid half hour, hour or more a day to hit the gym or play sports) isn't the only way, or even the best way, to stay in shape. In fact, this regimented style is a result of our modern workweek and society. Humans didn't evolve to exercise one hour of the day and then sit on our asses the other 23. For 98% of our history, we were on our feet, out and about, all day, every day, until we went to bed. Keep this in mind as you read the next few strategies. 2) Burn Calories, Not Minutes Unless you've had an efficiency expert follow you around, you have no idea how many calories you burn throughout the day. Since time is of the essence when you're a new dad, you're going to have to learn to fit your workout around your daily activities. No more leaning against the counter while something is in the microwave. No more staring at your oddly patterned chest hair while you're waiting for the water to heat up in the shower. If you can't block out the half hour or more you used to spend at the gym four or five times a week, those moments we just mentioned need to be maximized. Do 20 body squats while the frozen breast milk is warming up. Try and do 50 pushups before the water gets hot in the shower. You literally waste dozens of minutes a day that can be used to crank out a quick 30-second or one-minute workout. If you take advantage of those minutes every day, you'll be amazed at how much exercise you can squeeze in without changing your schedule one bit. 3) Unleash the Unconventional The No. 1 thing new parents complain about is the sudden lack of quality (or any) sleep. Unfortunately, you need sleep, so you can't cheat your body for too long. You might try to be Rambo and hit the gym on four hours of sleep with a 5-Hour Energy for a day or two, but the first morning you do that, your infant will decide that very night to show you what the word "colic" really means. Newborns can't talk or walk or do much of anything, but they have a remarkable ability to stage a crying marathon on the exact evenings that you would kill for some shuteye. When this happens, you will invariably try to steal some extra sleep in the morning, with the plan of heading to the gym on the way home from work. If this is your plan, forget it. It is a certainty that at least three things will come up to keep you from going. Since this is the case, you need to turn activities you will do anyway into exercises. For instance, every time you put your kid in the car seat, knock out a set of 20 car-seat curls with each arm. As long as you go slow, don't worry about harming your kid. The seat was meant to withstand a car crash; it should be able to handle your curls (as long as you don't drop it). Another idea is to perform lunges as you burp your kid. The movement will help move things around in their belly, and the lunges with a few extra pounds of body weight will be good for your legs and core. That's just the beginning. There are plenty of other ways to take everyday parental chores and turn them into muscle builders. 4) Eat Smart Kid food is awesome. Chicken nuggets, fruit treats, yogurt treats, chocolate milk. It's all good. Quick tip: Let the kids eat it. They are calorie incinerators at their young ages, and you, sadly, are not. Try and avoid as much of their leftovers as you can. And, yes, you will be too tired to cook on most nights and you'll rely on stuff you maybe haven't eaten in years -- fast food, microwaveable dinners, takeout places you recently discovered. But having a kid isn't an excuse to eat like a college freshman again. There's a zillion diets you can follow, but try to stick to this simple plan: No fried foods, no white carbs, no soda or fruit juices, chicken or fish instead of red meat, double vegetables instead of an appetizer, and desserts only on the weekend. That should keep you on the right path. This here is just a blueprint how to take parenting and and still find ways to do what it is you need to do, so that you will be just a versatile and active when the time come that your little kid get into his or her own sports and activities. As parents we just have to find a way to make it to that time, once we get there it becomes easy cause our kids are less dependent. As for anybody who don't know I have a kid that just over 1 years old, and life has took a dramatic change for me as a full time dad. There is so much I used to be able to do, that I'm just not able to do now, including hit the gym as much as I did. When creating this post, I had to take the typical 9-5 dad into account, but you can take this and implement your own schedule. For me that meant joining 24-hour gym and going to the gym at the crack of don 4 and 5am before my son was woke, or before I got him at 7am. Most of the time that means I'm sacrificing quality sleep hours, which I mentioned above is critical, but come on, let's be real parent=ultimate sacrifice especially when we talking about infants. So parents, not just dads, take this and use it, or come up with your own idea to stay in somewhat decent shape, we have to be the change we want to see and let's reduce the obesity rate that plagues America. Your kids will thank you, you'll thank yourself, your physician will thank you and most importantly your own body will thank you, What do you have to lose?